English Lexicology and Lexicography – Notes

Lexicology

- It is the science of language

- Its term is composed or made from two Greek morphemes which are: “lexic”
that means word/phrase and the other one is “logos” which denotes learning.
It also means “a department of knowledge”
 “The science of the word” is the literal meaning of lexicology
 Lexicon – term used in linguistics to indicate the archive of lexemes
 Lexemes – abstract and minimal units in a language that links together
For example: the words fly, flight, flew, flying and so on are all
morphologic variations of the lexeme fly.
 Lexicology investigates different lexical units: words, variable word groups,
phraseological units and morphemes which make up words and dealing with the
vocabulary of a language.
 Lexicology studies a word in different aspects: the patterns of semantic
relationship of words as also their phonological, morphological and contextual
behavior.
 Vocabulary is the term used to denote the system formed by the sum (?) total of
all the words and word equivalents that language possesses. (Arnold, 2012)
 The basic task of lexicology is the study and systematic description of the
vocabulary in respect to its origin, development, and current use.
 The word and vocabulary in Lexicology is studied as a system.
 “Lexicology studies the recurrent patterns of semantic relationships, and of any
formal phonological, morphological or contextual means by which they may be
rendered. It aims at systematization” [Arnold, 1979:14].
 The lexical system of every language contains productive elements typical of this
period, others that are obsolete and dropping out of usage, and finally, some new
phenomena, significant marks of new trends come to use.
 Lexicology as a branch of linguistics has its own aims and methods of scientific
research of lexical system on the ways and tendencies of vocabulary development.

1. General lexicology is a part of General linguistics. It is concerned with the

general study of words and vocabulary irrespective of the specific features of any
language. It investigates linguistic phenomena and properties common to all
languages which are generally referred to as language universals.

2. Special lexicology devotes its attention to the description of the characteristic

peculiarities in the vocabulary of a particular language (Russian, Kazakh,
German, French, etc.).
 Modern English Lexicology aims to give systematic description of the word-stock
of Modern English.
 Modern English Lexicology investigates the problems of word-structure and
word-formation, the semantic structure of English words, the main principles
underlying the classification of vocabulary units into various groupings.
 These are the two principal approaches in linguistic science to the study of
language material: synchronic (Greek ‘syn’ – ‘together, with’ and ‘chronos’ –
‘time’) and diachronic (Greek ‘dia’ – ‘through’) approaches
 The discipline of Modern English Lexicology is therefore a course of Special
Descriptive Lexicology which studies the functions of words and their specific
structure, its morphological and semantic structures, its object of study being the
English vocabulary as its exist in the present time.

(Morphological - relating to the form of structure of things)

 “The modern approach of word studies is based on distinction between the

external and the internal structures of the word” (Antrushina, 2004)
 External Structure: the word we mean is its morphological structure. Example
would be the word “uncomfortable”the following morphemes can be
distinguished: the prefix “un-”, the root “comfort” and the adjective forming
suffix “-able”. All these morphemes constitute the external (morphological)
structure of the word uncomfortable.
 Internal Structure: commonly referred to the word’s semantic structure (through
the meaning of the words) This is certainly the word’s main aspect because a
word can serve the purposes of human communication solely due to their
meanings.
 The diachronic approach deals with the changes and the development of a
vocabulary in the course of time. It is special Historical Lexicology that deals with
the evolution of the vocabulary units of a language as time goes by.
 English Historical Lexicology is concerned with the origin of English vocabulary
units , their change and development, the linguistic and extra linguistic factors
modifying the structures.
 Lexicology came into being to meet the demands of many different branches
applied linguistics.
 Lexicology is linked with Contrastive and Comparative Linguistics which the
purposes are to study the correlation between the vocabularies of two or more
languages and find out the correspondences between the vocabulary units of
different languages that can be compared and described.
 Branches of Linguistics

- Modern English Lexicology is closely connected with other branches of

linguistics, because the word, word-groups and phrases are studied in several branches
of linguistics and not in lexicology only.

- Lexicology is linked with general linguistics, the history of the language,

phonetics, stylistics, grammar and such new branches of our science as sociolinguistics
and some others.

- Phonetics investigates the phonetic structure of a language which is mainly

concerned with the functioning of phonetic units and studies the outer sound-form of
the word i.e. its system of phonemes and intonation patterns.